Noah Lyles had a 100m problem. In four perfect steps, he solved it

This was an Olympic gold decided 18 months ago. At the start of last year, Noah Lyles and his coach Lance Brauman realised the sprinter had a problem: he wasn’t very quick.

For a sprinter, that is not good. He was quick once he got going – he just started more slowly than a French art house film.

Lyles was always a great 200m runner – he won world championships in 2019 and 2022 over the distance – but often would never bother running the 100m at USA trials because, as fast as he might finish, he gave up too much ground early in races. He tried to run the double in 2021 but only finished seventh in the 100m.

But he craved the 100m-200m double. You can’t surpass Usain Bolt and not run 100s as well as 200s.

So at the start of last year, Lyles and Brauman decided that to win 100m races the US sprinter needed to stop running them. He needed to start running shorter races and so he ran a dozen races over 60m indoors. Why? It was the first 60m of his races he needed to worry about – not the last 40m.

In August last year he won the world championship over 100m in Budapest. In Paris’ Stade de France, Lyles didn’t run the perfect race, he ran the perfectly timed race. The brevity and beautiful simplicity of the race deceives about its complexity. A race over the Olympics’ shortest running distance, run in 9.79 seconds, was a race in four stages.

This is how he got them right.

The start

At the gun, Lyles was the slowest out of the blocks. His reaction time of 0.178 seconds was the equal worst in the field alongside Letsile Tobogo of Botswana, and 0.07 seconds slower than compatriot Fred Kerley, who was quickest. When you consider Lyles won the race by five-thousandths of a second, that sort of difference at the start was critical.

Brauman considers “the start” the first five steps out of the blocks. Others consider it the time it takes to get from the blocks to an upright position. By either reckoning, Lyles was dead last at the start, but he knew he would be chasing – and he wasn’t as far adrift as he might have been.

While his reaction time was slow, critically Lyles kept his line and didn’t speed skate and power from side to side off each foot to get acceleration – it was forward momentum he needed.

The drive

This was from about the 10- to 30-metre mark and Lyles was still leaning hard forwards before getting into a completely upright position. He was driving to get up to rhythm.

Lyles’ race wasn’t about power like, say, former world champions Christian Coleman or Asafa Powell. He is smaller and lighter ... but his legs move fast.

At 30m, Lyles was still last. Kishane Thompson, who stands five centimetres taller and is comfortably eight to 10 kilograms heavier, was leading. Critically, Lyles might have been last, but he had his speed up. His was now at 40.6km/h, the same as Thompson in the lead. They were now the quickest in the race.

The acceleration

Technically, Lyles won the race with his dip at the line. In reality, this was when he won it – through the mid-stages of the race. This was when Lyles being a better 200m runner than the rest of the field started to tell.

Lyles was upright, his arms were pumping. He was keeping balanced in his upper body and his legs were moving more quickly than anyone else’s. He was cranking to top speed. From being last at the 30m mark, he was third by the 60m mark and had hit 43.5km/h – 0.4km/h quicker than Thompson, who was leading.

When he devised the plan to build Lyles’ starts, Brauman was convinced he didn’t have to build him into being the best starter, he just needed to minimise the damage in the early part of the race.

“If [Lyles] is in position with [the best] guys at 60 metres, with his top end, then some people have things to worry about,” Brauman told Lets Run magazine last year. “All we’re really trying to do is put him in a position so that at 60 metres, he has contact.”

But by the 60m in Paris, Lyles had contact. Having been last for more than half the race, he was now third.

The close

At 70m the reigning Olympic champion Marcel Lamont Jacobs was in touch. He had started strongest and he was flying. Then his hamstring blew out and so did his chances. The longer-striding Thompson was leading still, but the difference with Lyles at this stage was that, as a 200m specialist, Lyles was still accelerating after 70m, while the others were just trying to hold their pace.

Lyles hit a top speed of 43.6km/h. No one else went faster in the race. Thompson peaked at 43.2km/h and Kerley at 43.1km/h. It doesn’t sound like much, but neither was the final margin.

At the line, Lyles dipped. It made the difference, the five-thousandths of a second difference between him and Thompson, between gold and silver.

How far is five-thousandths of a second in a 100m race? The negatives at the photo finish would say that when you are running at 46km/h and leaning forward hard into your run, it is the time it takes to go from your chin to your neck.

Put another way – the blink of an eye takes between 0.1 and 0.4 seconds. Lyles didn’t win in the blink of an eye. He won before your eyelid decided to start blinking.

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